Brussels /2 & 3 February 2013

Bdale Garbee

Technologist and Community Builder

A contributor to the Free Software community since 1979, Bdale's background also includes many years of hardware design, Unix internals, and embedded systems work. He was an early participant in the Debian project, helped port Debian GNU/Linux to 5 architectures, served as Debian Project Leader, is chairman of the Debian Technical Committee, and remains active in the Debian community.

In 2012, Bdale retired from HP, where he served as Chief Technologist for Open Source and Linux. During his tenure, HP engaged in a wide variety of Open Source activities, and maintained consistent market leadership in the sale of servers and storage to Linux users.

Altus Metrum, LLC, is a small business Bdale founded with Keith Packard that designs, builds, and sells completely open hardware and open source avionics solutions for use in high power model rockets.

Bdale serves as President of Software in the Public Interest, and on the boards of directors of the Linux Foundation and the Freedombox Foundation. He is a frequent speaker at Linux and Open Source conferences.

In 2008, Bdale became the first individual recipient of a Lutece d'Or award from the Federation Nationale de l'Industrie du Logiciel Libre in France.

Bdale engages in a wide variety of personal activities. In addition to high-powered model rocketry, he is widely known for his contributions to the amateur radio hobby including packet radio, weak-signal communications, software defined radio, and building amateur satellites.